1. My Decision:
If I were the new key player CEO at Planeta, I would stick to the old UNIX platform for Casa del Libro.
2. My Criteria:
In many ways, Casa del Libro was way ahead of the game when they started selling books online in 1995. It was a “very artisan website, not integrated with the back office, running in an IBM AS/400 platform. Everyday operations implied a great deal of manual processing.” For anyone who has been to a Casa del Libro store, this original system actually matches the image I have of them in my mind. When Planeta decided they needed to bring Casa del Libro into the “future” they worked with AOL and a consultant group to revamp their online system so it could handle the expected growth. Of course, this meant they were essentially “building up an entire company.” Their new system was “based on Sun machines, it had 4 servers with 2 CPUs each, running in a Solaris (Unix) operating system. The software included a database manager (Oracle 8.i running in cluster), Vignette 5.6 to manage content and support e-commerce, and Excalibur v5.3 as the search engine. The design was also redundant, in order to guarantee high availability. To complete that, a firewall and a load balancer were also included.”
It is evident that Casa del Libro underwent many changes in a short span of time. And what, exactly, were their needs? Not that many, if you think about it. They were just selling books. They weren’t Amazon and I don’t think they even wanted to be (even if AOL probably did). Switching systems would be like building a new company all over again and would cause some commotion internally as well as leading them to stray even farther from their original purpose. Although switching would save them money, part of the cost cutting was as a result of some bad luck with timing and repositioning decisions made on behalf of executives that weren’t necessarily in touch with Casa del Libro or their target market. Once the dotcom world regained its strength and Casa del Libro went back to its roots, their online market would recapture its strength and possibly gain more clients according to its better operating system (as compared to what they had in ’95).
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